Translating EU Battery Rules: Carbon Data Governance in China–Europe Supply Chains, 2022–2025
This article examines how the sustainability requirements of the EU Battery Regulation are translated into publicly documented compliance arrangements among selected leading Chinese battery and new energy vehicle firms and related actors in China-Europe battery supply chains.Focusing on 2022-2025, it uses qualitative document analysis and phased document-based reconstruction of EU regulatory texts, battery-passport and carbon-footprint methodology documents,Chinese policy materials,corporate reports, certification-body materials and industry sources.Rather than calculating product emissions or claiming to observe internal implementation,the article analyses how carbon-footprint requirements,due diligence, traceability,certification audits and digital battery passports are reorganised as data-based compliance tasks. It shows that EU battery rules become operational through certification bodies, industry platforms, customer-facing requirements,corporate reporting systems and supplier-management procedures.Public materials from CATL,BYD and EVE Energy document uneven forms of adaptation,including carbon-data management,supplier governance,certification preparation and battery-passport participation.The article terms this pattern selective compliance datafication:regulatory components become visible in different organisational forms and to different degrees,without implying deliberate rejection of the remaining requirements.Standard alignment and capacity building coexist with regulatory asymmetry,concentrated authority over acceptable data and certification,and potential cost transmission to smaller suppliers.China is treated not as representative of the Asia Pacific as a whole,but as a strategically important regional case through which one form of Europe-Asia Pacific regulatory interaction can be examined.
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